The Hauser Group | Public Relations in the Public Interest

Immigration Reform and the 2010 Mid-Term elections

In Mexico earlier this week, President Obama asserted that comprehensive immigration reform would be addressed legislatively in 2010.  That marker sets the table for a fascinating political gambit that involves two core questions:

1)      How hard, in late 2009, will progressives push the Administration to make immigration reform its top 2010 agenda?

2)      How hard will the right try to make immigration the top issue in key mid-term elections?

In short form, my answers would be 1) I hope so, and 2) Very.

Consider the landscape.  Over the next three months (at least) the battle over health care will be ferocious, bewildering, and all-consuming.  I think there will be a Grand Compromise, exhaustively reached in late Fall, that fudges enough on budget cost, cost containment, and a limited public option that most progressives will claim victory.

And then what?  Will battered progressives pick up the immigration mantle and both privately and publicly demand that the Administration lay down the gauntlet for 2010?  Will the coalition of grassroots activists, Latino advocates, unions, and business leaders be able to not just re-form, but sharpen and expand their political skills beyond the summer of 2007?

Is the money there?  Will the labor movement, stung by this year’s failure on the Employee Free Choice Act, re-double its efforts there rather than on immigration?  Will the business “community” give a half-hearted effort, distracted by its own problems and bruised by the health care debate?

I honestly don’t know.  But what I am fairly certain of is the Obama Administration wouldn’t weep to miss a election-defining bloody battle over immigration.  There are a thousand ways in Washington to avoid a real fight, and only one way to have one.  Advocates of immigration reform need to build their political plans now for full-scale political pressure on the Administration before this calendar year is out.  Reform has a chance only until the next August recess and only if the Administration strongly and constantly identifies it as its top domestic issue for 2010.

Of course, conservatives hope for just that.  As Charlie Cook notes, Americans’ appetite for change is diminishing.  The right-wing would love nothing more than to make 2010 a referendum on “too much, too far, too fast.”

And in 2010, I don’t think “All politics is local.”  I think very little of it will be.  A country that has spun wildly from 2008-2010 will take that moment to plant a flag.  Conservative strategists will build a national argument on amnesty for illegal aliens, socialized medicine, gay marriage, and the specter of more activist Supreme Court judges.

It will be shrill and it will be creepy.  But we have to fight it, not mock it. Aspiration brought us Obama and these opportunities; on immigration reform, only early strategy and political backbone will deliver them.

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